This invention relates to a method of operating a device comprising a display device, a user interface device and a processor, and to the device itself. In a preferred embodiment, the invention addresses problems with specifying and segmenting a period of time using a graphical user interface (GUI).
Many modern computing devices have constraints on the available display area, for example smartphones and tablet computers have restrictions on the size of the display area, since the computing device must be small enough and light enough to be portable. This means that often the user's interaction with the GUI is far more complex and fiddly than is ideal. A typical example of such a user task would be to generate a structured meeting schedule that specifies the meeting duration and the segmentation of time corresponding to a desired agenda. Current solutions involve multiple UI components, such as multiple drop-down menus, making them awkward and time consuming to use. They also produce results that are visually poor and typically also require large amounts of screen real-estate making them unsuitable for modern devices such as smartphones and watches.